Do you remember that long lost skill called writing that you learned back in Elementary School? Well it's back with Google's newest innovation called Handwriting. Forget bringing up your keyboard to do a search on Google's search page, now you can just write anywhere on your screen with your finger and it will be automatically entered into the search box.

To activate the feature, you'll need to go to Google.com in your mobile browser and enable the Handwrite option in settings. After you save it and back out, a Handwrite icon appears in the bottom right corner of the screen; tap it and it activates the writing surface. Place your finger anywhere on the screen and begin to write. Your beautiful handwriting appears on the screen and gets translated to standard letters that appear in the search field. Autosuggest will be cued up to make the search even faster. Check out the video of Handwrite in action. Enjoy!

Pretty cool, if a bit impractical on a small screen. I'd love to see something like this for the desktop browser.

Click to expand...

Well, yes and no. Certainly you would have difficulty searching for a long phrase or a highly technical description with that method, but the video shows how with just a few letters, even partial words, it can search and be fairly accurate with the results for the simpler searches. Pizza D (delivery) was a good one, and so was cupc (cupcakes). Ski Lessons had me laughing, but of course that was a tablet.

It works fabulously on even a small screen. You can write one letter on top of the other if you give it a half-second to recognize each letter. I would certainly never type on my screen as I drove down the road with my Thunderdolt in the dashdock...but if I did, this would make it so much easier...

Talk about going back in time. Why would you want to write something out if you can just type it? Isn't that the whole reason typewriters were invented? C'mon Google. Give us something innovative. Apple can have this for all I care.

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